From pork chops to peach cobbler, the spread at Madison Soul Food Kitchen offers all the
familiar fixings of a hearty Sunday supper.

The volunteer-run restaurant tucked inside United House of Prayer for All People, 1731 Greenway
Ave., dishes up lunch and dinner seven days a week.

Menu options change daily, but one ingredient remains constant.

“I believe there’s a spirit here,” said Michael Ashford, assistant pastor for the Near East Side
church. “Many customers say they feel that the food itself is blessed.”

Soul food, after all, is about more than filling the stomach.

“It’s about the community; it’s about family,” said Kwodwo Ababio, founder of New Harvest Cafe
at 1675 Arlington Ave. N.E. in North Linden. The cafe menu features a soul-food lunch buffet served
until 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

“Soul food has always brought people together. We can sit down, break bread and talk.”

It’s why Ababio also lends his dine-in space to host concerts, plays and tutoring sessions. In
warmer months, he and neighborhood volunteers tend to an adjacent garden that bears a seasonal crop
of collard greens, cabbage and turnips for the New Harvest kitchen.

Plenty of love, likewise, goes into a spread that features smothered chicken, turkey meatloaf
and other comfort-food offerings derived from the Chicago stovetop of his late mother and mentor,
Juanita.

Much like his matriarch, Ababio doesn’t use measuring cups: A pinch of this or a handful of that
suffices.

Such adaptation, in part, mirrors the origins of soul food — a blanket term that came to
prominence during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s to define Southern cuisine first developed
by African slaves who, out of necessity, cooked with leftover animal parts and indigenous
plants.

As the cuisine evolved with access to better ingredients (and restaurants touting the regional
fare sprung up coast to coast), so, too, did health concerns. A study released last year by the
University of Alabama at Birmingham found that a soul-food-style diet of fried meats, saturated
fats and sweet beverages greatly heightened one’s risk of stroke.

That has led some chefs to scale back on the salt and shortening.

Not so at Bread & Better.

“We need every ounce of fat to be there,” said owner Karen Whitson, who last year revived the
name and menu of her former Downtown restaurant in a kitchen space in Rhema Christian Center, 2100
Agler Rd. A soul-food lunch menu is served Thursdays and Sundays (other days feature healthful
salads and soups).

But an occasional indulgence, she said, is good for patrons: “I want them to remember a favorite
aunt, something their mother made — to feel like they’re totally at home.”

“I can’t tell you that one,” said Bernard Lawshea, who launched a namesake joint on the Near
East Side before relocating his business four years ago to 1488 Morse Rd.

Like its former location, the North Side outlet keeps late-night weekend hours to serve tilapia
sandwiches and shrimp dinners to night owls.

Lawshea left an engineering career in 2006 to fill the void of what he viewed as a lack of
authentic soul food in central Ohio.

And his roots aren’t muted: “As far as the marketing goes, I flaunt my blackness,” said Lawshea,
a Cleveland native whose parents ran a restaurant there.

Whether it’s his freshly sliced yams or made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese, “This is what I
grew up on.”

Ties to the past also influence the proprietors of the Hungry Soul Cafe, whose menu offers two
distinctly different avenues — soul food and Hungarian cooking.

Co-owner Anita Keller wants both cuisines to appeal to anyone.

“It’s not fancy; it’s not tarted up,” said Keller, a Grandview Heights resident whose personal
cookbook includes decades-old recipes from ancestors in North Carolina and Virginia.

“You know how some places say: ‘Oh, we serve collard greens, but we’re doing a blah, blah, blah
gastrique with this and that?’ ”

The restaurant, located on the first floor of a Downtown parking garage at 30 S. Young St.,
instead features two fuss-free weekday specials: a classic Southern dish (chicken and waffles or
shrimp and grits, for example) and a Hungarian entree (cabbage rolls, stuffed peppers).

Despite cultural and physical separation, both flavor profiles share a historical connection: “
poor people cooking with whatever they had,” said Anita’s spouse and business partner, George
Keller, who is of Hungarian descent.

Most sought-after is a Thursday lunch special of fried chicken, macaroni and collard greens — so
popular each week that some Hungry Soul diners call ahead to reserve a plate before it sells
out.